Steve's blog about RMPrepUSB, Easy2Boot and USB booting. Please tick one of the 'Reactions' boxes if you enjoyed a post.
Visit www.rmprepusb.com for over 130 Tutorials on USB booting or www.easy2boot.com for a unique USB multiboot solution.

Friday, 1 July 2016

QR code in E2B v1.81f

E2B v1.81f will allow you to add a QR code 'STAMP' to the menu wallpaper when you run \MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE (run as admin).cmd to make a new E2B drive.

The QR code contains the URL for the E2B website's 'List of tested ISOs/payloads' page, so you can use your mobile phone's QR reader to quickly look up the recommended way to add any payload to your E2B drive if your first attempt did not work!

If your mobile phone does not already have a QR reader, there are many free apps that support QR code scanning. Try it out on the screenshot below now...

The MyE2B.cfg lines that it adds for the animated E2B icon and the QR stamp are:

QR.bmp is LZMA-compressed (see \_ISO\docs\E2B Utilities\LZMA folder) so it is only 1K in size.

Of course, you can easily generate a QR code yourself using one of the many websites and add it as a 24-bit colour .bmp STAMP to your E2B drive. The QR code does not have to contain a URL (e.g. YouTube video), it can contain up to 3kB of any text, so it can contain code, e.g. the text of a useful script or batch file, or an email address, contact info or calendar event, etc.

Note: because QR codes have error correction, you can 'corrupt' up to about 30% of it and it will still work. This means you can use MSPaint or some other bitmap editor to add text or a logo to it and it will still work:

Same QR code but "E2B" has been added

to the centre and it still works.

At one event, each of our T-shirts had a unique QR code containing our company name plus our name and contact details. A customer could just point their smartphone at us and take a picture or scan the QR code.